Fourth Week of Advent: Human Being – Wisdom

In the fourth week of Advent, we honor the human being, a being of wisdom. We humans are said to have the other three kingdoms of nature within us. We share a mineral body with the stones. With the plants, we share the ability to grow, respirate, and heal. Together with the animals, we have sentience – desire, personality, and the ability to move towards what we want and away from what we don’t. However, we alone retain the capacity for wisdom which can only comes for a being with symbolic language.

While it is true some higher animals like chimps and gorillas have concrete language, there is no evidence they consciously ponder higher principles nor give meaning to life. It’s all for them about survival, procreation, and social cohesion. While these are also important for humans, they are not enough. We are meaning seeking/creating creatures, and at this point in the unfoldment of the earth, humans are alone in that.

How do we practice the virtue of wisdom in the fourth week of Advent?

The first week of Advent was about justice through reestablishing balance in relationships. This is ground of morality. The second week was about temperance, aka, controlling our behavior for the greater good of both ourselves and others. Having lived through those trials, the third week of Advent was about courage, especially to face the unknown in ourselves and the world. Finally, in the fourth week of Advent, we crown our initiation with wisdom. After the trials comes the learning.

We do this through review, for life is a continuous breathing process of action and reflection, action and reflection. Do you make it a habit to review your day each night? It is like harvesting the fruits of all you’ve sown. I would say it’s “for better and for worse,” but in the end, it’s all “for better” if you’re learning. Even if you’ve messed up big-time, when you acknowledge it you’re inevitably going to change, even if that doesn’t happen the first time. Eventually, it will if you keep up with it. Wisdom comes naturally to a reflective mind.

Here is a suggestion. At the end of the day, look back through your day in reverse. Look at everything that happened to you as if it were happening to a stranger. That helps you look at yourself objectively. The “doing it in reverse” allows you to see the emergence of one experience from another.

From the subjective to the objective

Seeing yourself objectively is incredibly liberating, because then it’s more factual and less judgmental. You become your own teacher and speak to yourself as a student. You wouldn’t insult a student for making a mistake, would you? Likewise, this look-back is not about judgment in the slightest. It’s just about recalling objectively. Wisdom arises naturally from this. You need not make it happen.

Moving from the subjective to the objective in life is exactly the point. Wisdom comes when we transcend ourselves. The paradox of being human is having an ego so we can overcome egotism through loving relationship. This is what the human being is capable of that the animal is not, at least not consciously. We can consciously transcend ourselves, and that is the human task.

Life review in the fourth week of Advent

In this fourth week of Advent, I encourage you not just to review each day, but to review your whole life. Look back and see what experiences and people made a lasting impact on you to make you who you are today. Such a meditation can have profound results on your understanding of your life, life in general, and how to become a better human. After all, we only exist as ourselves in relationship to others. Who would we be if it weren’t for those who impacted us?

Birth of a new possibility

The fourth week of Advent takes us right into Christmas. As I’ve said many times before, one need to not be Christian to appreciate and participate in this seasonal transformation. Distilled to its core essence, Christmas is about giving birth to something higher which rescues humanity from its egotism. This is a universal process, not just a Christian one, that ideally happens in every human soul at some point so we can become who we were meant to be. This week’s process of harvesting wisdom through reflection on our days and lives makes us better, parents, teachers, and human beings. Our children deserve that from us, don’t they?

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